A blog to discuss my many wargaming projects.
How many, you ask?
Too many.
And I'm adding more
all the time.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

Buck Surdu's "Combat Patrol" WWII Skirmish, Now Availalbe

I wanted to let my readers know that Buck Surdu's "Combat Patrol" WWII card-based skirmish rules for miniatures gaming are now available for purchase at Drive Thru Cards. I as lucky enogh to be one of the playtesters for these rules, and can say they really are a lot of fun.
Here is a quick promotional video:

Here are some of the features of the rules:

The Double Random Activation™ mechanism provides the unpredictability and drama of card-based activation without the drawbacks. This activation mechanism was originally developed for Battles by GASLIGHT and was refined during the development of Look, Sarge, No Charts titles. The mechanism uses cards for activation but ensures that multiple players are acting at the same time.

No big yellow or pink chart cards cluttering up your beautiful gaming tables. Each player needs one or two 3″x5″ cards with the information about his units, including their weapons and equipment. Other than those, there are no chart cards. The back of these unit records includes the modifiers for hand-to-hand combat and terrain effects on movement. After a game or two, players rarely need to refer to these, so two unit records can be taped back to back for even less clutter.

Combat resolution is resolved by flipping cards. Players read different sections of the cards in the Action Deck depending on what they are trying to do: shooting, resolving hits, “rolling” to penetrate enemy vehicles, hand-to-hand combat, movement, and morale. In development, I took a series of charts and then broke them apart to fit on an Action Deck of 50 cards. Flipping a card is essentially the same as rolling a die and looking up the result on a table. The difference is that you don’t have to do all that table look up. Flip a card and determine whether you got a hit. If so, flip the next card to see which target figure was hit, how severely, and whether he is protected by cover.

Cover is represented explicitly. Instead of cover providing a negative modifier to hit, if you get a hit, when you flip the next card in the Action Deck, you look for cover icons. If the target figure is in the type of cover indicated on the card, instead of being wounded or incapacitate he ducks back behind cover and is stunned. While the use of cover as a to-hit modifier and the process in Combat Patrol™ can be mathematically equivalent, there is something intuitively appealing to knowing that the window sill deflected that round that would have otherwise hit your figure. In play tests, this explicit representation of cover has made players make better use of cover while maneuvering their squads.

Somewhat randomized movement speeds based on the Guts level of the unit or its leader.

The G.A.M.E.R.™ engine name is an acronym for the attributes which describe figures in Combat Patrol™: Guts (morale), Accuracy (shooting), Melee (hand-to-hand combat), Endurance (how many wounds a figure can take), and Reaction. The game master can “sculpt” a unit to fit a historical scenario.

Playable on multiple levels of resolution. At the lowest level, all the figures in a unit have the same attributes. At the highest level, each figure can have different attributes. The levels of resolution can be mixed so that the Commando unit has more detail than the installation security personnel. The allows games that have a historical feel as well as those with a more cinematic feel.

Rules for replacements of personnel and equipment between scenarios enable players to represent mini-campaigns.

Ground scale is 1 inch = 5 yards, pretty close to the scale of the 28mm figures I used in play testing.

The basic rules are just eight pages! And that includes several pictorial examples of firing and grenade resolution that fill almost a full page themselves.

Buck has prepared a tutorial video, explaining soe of the mechanics of the rules:

The rules are free, all you need to do is buy a set of 4 decks of cards to get started!Combat-Patrol

About Me

I've been a gamer since my high school days in the 70's. I'm married to Jennifer, and reside in Maryland. I am co-author, along with Buck Surdu, of "GASLIGHT" and several of its supplements, and "Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII", and "LSNC: ACW". I also wrote the "Thunder & Plunder"; half of our Pirate rules, "Blood & Swash"
I am a founding member of the HAWKs wargames club.